Mexico

by James A. Michener

  Nor did Scott, so with a masterly blockade to keep any Mexican supply ship from sneaking into the wharves, and calling upon all the firepower of his ships, he laid down such a furious bombardment that after a few days the Americans marched ashore, virtually unopposed. It was now a free run up to the altiplano where Mexico City awaited the assault. Clay supposed the march might take two or three weeks, the siege another three weeks, and the surrender sometime in mid-May at the latest.

  What a surprise my grandfather had! March went by, then April, May and June, and General Scott was still working his way gingerly through the Mexican jungle, up steep paths, past well-defended forts and formidable cities like Puebla. When the subordinate generals urged more speed, Scott growled: “When I reach the capital I want the battle to be already won. Every advantage should be ours. I want a quick, decisive skirmish.”

  Clay made good use of this dilatory approach, and in a way he could not have planned. A Mexican scout who had volunteered to lead Scott inland in hopes of gaining American citizenship later, one Pablo Mugica, found that he too had time on his hands, so he offered to teach Clay Spanish, for a fee, and as June eased into July and August neared, Jubal gained a low-level mastery of Spanish that surprised him, and he became valuable in interrogating prisoners.

  It was on this long, tedious uphill climb that my grandfather became familiar with Mexico’s constant revelation of wonders: the great volcanoes piercing the sky, the matted jungle, the handsome little villages each with its whitewashed walls, the silent valleys, the churches hundreds of years old, and everywhere the peóns in their skimpy white clothes and their donkeys.

  The more he saw of Mexico, the more he liked it, and while he never thought of living in such a culturally retarded place, the beauty of the land and the essential charm of the inhabitants’ Catholic way of life did attract him, so that when other Americans, sweating up the hills, complained or denigrated the country as a hellhole, he was far from agreeing with them. He was not impressed with the military genius of its leaders, for with their enormous numerical superiority he knew that they should have been able to sweep Scott back into the Atlantic, but the people he met on his marches he liked.

  His experiences with Scott as he toiled in the general’s headquarters handling paper details were constantly surprising, for Scott seethed with hatred of Polk, Pillow and Zach Taylor as he encountered difficulties. His suspicion that spies lurked within his own staff increased, and for good reason, because he really was surrounded by men, usually political appointees, who hoped that he would fail and sometimes took active steps to try to ensure that he did. But he was also accompanied by trusted regular army generals who were as determined as he to achieve a victory. Always outnumbered and opposed by first-class artillery under the command of Mexican army officers trained in Europe, Scott’s subordinates acted resolutely and responsibly, even though their commander in chief seemed to enjoy abusing them and defaming them in his written reports. Whenever Clay read Scott’s latest diatribe against his generals he wondered how they could obey his orders.

  But Clay also saw the manner in which Scott sought diligently to identify which of his junior officers showed promise as potential generals, and these he praised extravagantly, giving them choice assignments and then reporting on their successes to Washington. Years later when Clay was trying to reach a mature assessment of Scott as a military man, he wrote: “Reading his reports on his juniors penned in 1847, it would seem that he was eager to pinpoint those young men who would prove the greatest Civil War generals fifteen years later in 1862. He was proud of having P.G.T. Beauregard on his staff, quickly spotted George C. McClellan as promising, and mentioned enthusiastically six or seven other young men who would become important generals.”

  But Scott’s shrewdest evaluation concerned a young engineer named Captain Robert E. Lee. In the dispatches Clay had to copy he read repeatedly of Scott’s high regard for this young Virginian: “Greatly distinguished himself at the siege of Veracruz … indefatigable … bravery under heavy fire … an officer of great promise.” But the dispatch Jubal remembered longest and quoted to his family most often came at the end of a message in which he commended both George McClellan and P.G.T. Beauregard: “Captain Lee, Engineer, also bore important orders from me until he fainted from a wound and the loss of two nights’ sleep at the batteries.”

  Scott required a substantial amount of time to get from Veracruz to the capital, 27 March to 14 September, but once there he achieved a series of stupendous victories, and Jubal saw what a splendid general he was. Nothing gave Jubal more satisfaction than the report he helped draft for headquarters in Washington, for it depicted not only a good general but a great man:

  Since our final victory carried us right to the gates of the Mexican capital, which was poorly defended, we expected General Scott to give us the order: “Rush in, overwhelm the guards and celebrate a well-earned victory.” But to our amazement he halted us, conferred with his generals and said in my hearing: “We shall stop here two days to allow the stricken Mexican government time to stabilize, to get their breath and recover their courage. I order this for two reasons: in the days to come we shall have to consult with these men to work out a sensible peace, and they will behave more sensibly if they have retained their sense of honor. And I have learned from history that when a conquering army bursts into a city after a protracted siege, terrible things are likely to happen. Arson, plunder, murder, rape. These are things that do not happen under my command. We will wait till tempers cool, theirs and ours.”

  Two days later, as planned, a small contingent of our troops assaulted a minor gate defended by a token force of Mexicans. After a brief skirmish our troops broke through. The Mexicans felt that they had defended the city with honor, and when we marched in to take possession, our troops in order, our flags flying, there was no burning, plunder or rape.

  Jubal had one other observation on the Mexican War:

  At the final battle of Chapultepec late in the siege, an incident occurred that has always perplexed me. It was a confused affair, which consumed several hours, for the Mexicans had the advantage in numbers and position, but in the end we prevailed. Later we learned that during the battle a group of very young cadets from a military college located on the hill refused to abandon their advantageous site even though their instructors and the older cadets had fled. With extraordinary heroism these lads temporarily repulsed the American attacks but eventually they were engulfed by our numbers and six died. When word of their patriotism spread through Mexico, they became enshrined in legend as Los Niños Héroes. Years later, when I had become a Mexican, people would ask me: “If you were at Chapultepec during the battle, what did you think of Los Niños Héroes?” and at first I used to say: “We were never aware of them,” because it was too painful to consider. But this caused such baleful looks that later I said: “If you’d had one brigade more of those children we’d never have won,” and my listeners were gratified by this response.

  The reason I emphasize my grandfather’s role in the Mexican War and his relationship with General Scott is that this friendship produced an incident which would determine the latter half of his life. Shortly after the end of the hostilities, Scott summoned Jubal and said: “Major Clay, no man on my staff has behaved more admirably than you. You have my complete trust. I’m placing you in command of a dozen cavalrymen and their sergeant for an unusual assignment. I’ve asked General Santa Anna to issue you a safe conduct to ride northwest of here to Toledo, a mining town with the same name as the town in Spain. I want to know what kind of mines it has, especially whether it’s iron or coal. It looks to be about a hundred and eighty miles away. Take money, take food, take ammunition, take your eyes and ears, and Godspeed.”

  So toward the end of September 1847 my grandfather’s party of fourteen rode out from Mexico City toward Toledo, which was almost as far west of the capital as Veracruz had been east, and it had taken them half a year to traverse that distance, but now the
fighting was ended and they rode at their pleasure, always attentive to repel snipers or bandits who might try to assault them. It was, as Grandfather loved to tell my father in later years, a trip marked by grand vistas of the volcanoes behind them and the glorious panoramas ahead. They passed historic settlements like Querétaro, saw now and then a small pyramid or other relics of past occupation, and in time they reached the more barren ground covered with cactus, a plant with which the Virginians in the party were not familiar.

  In time, when the cooler breezes of November made the weather comfortable, they reached a crest from which they looked ahead to their target, the famous mining city of Toledo, with a large pyramid to the right, a handsome aqueduct running from it into the city limits, inside which stood a central plaza bordered by colonial buildings including a cathedral, and off to one side an imitation of a Roman coliseum built of red boards. When Grandfather tried his Spanish on a man with a mule he said: “That’s where they run with the bulls,” and when Jubal asked: “And where are the mines?” the man said proudly: “Beyond the city, to the north,” and all my grandfather could see was a vague mass of shacks.

  “¿Dónde está la cárcel?” Jubal asked a man at the edge of the city, and the man surveyed the troop and asked: “¿Quién es el prisionero?” for Jubal had confused the word cárcel, jail, with cuartel, military headquarters or barracks. When the mistake was explained, both sides began to laugh, and the Mexican called over some friends to explain that the American soldiers wanted to go to jail. Thus my grandfather entered the colonial city of Toledo accompanied by robust laughter.

  The commanding officer of the city’s guard detachment recommended that the Americans stay at a hostelry that occupied a building famous in the region, the House of Tile, a handsome building facing a fine park to the south and a spectacular sight on the north, the huge pyramid of Toledo, so that during Jubal’s three-week stay in the city he gazed alternately at the square, which was only three hundred years old, or the brooding pyramid, thirteen hundred years old. Both gave him constant delight.

  He had explained to the Mexicans that he had come to visit their famous mines, and they corrected him: “Only one, señor, but it is big enough,” and when they formed a mounted caravan they took him some seven miles to the north along a wide but winding road to a nondescript site on a hillside consisting of a group of low adobe buildings, their roofs made of vines intertwined with tree branches and plastered with mud. There was no impressive building that could have been associated with a major mine, but there was a large circular area across which narrow paths ran, and Clay saw that they led to a vast, dark hole. This was the famed Mineral de Toledo, as highly regarded in Spain as in Mexico. In Spanish the name was certainly in the plural for the reason that no one could believe that the silver that poured out of Toledo could have come from one mine only.

  “Only silver?” Clay asked and the men nodded. “No iron?” and they shook their heads. “Any iron in the hills beyond?” and again they disappointed him. With that quick solution to the problem he had been sent to investigate, he could have marched back to the capital, but instead he made a fortunate decision: “I’d like to see what quality of mine they have,” and he tarried in Toledo, finding the citizens willing to help, for they were justly proud of their treasure. They took him to a Spanish engineer from the home country, a wiry, sandy-haired man not over five feet three, who seemed actually delighted to entertain a knowledgeable visitor: “Mine? Engineer?” When Clay said “Abogado,” the Spaniard said something that indicated that he liked lawyers, and Clay struck his own forehead: “Algodón,” which meant that he raised cotton, and again there was laughter.

  The distance from the shack, in which he met the head of the mine, to the open shaft was only some fifteen yards, but the gravity with which the miner led the way and the care he exercised when approaching the open hole made Clay cautious as he moved forward. At this point eight small Indian women came up out of the mine, each with a basket on her head containing what Clay supposed to be some dark ore containing silver.

  When the women had passed, their bare feet making no sound, their solemn faces showing no animation, Clay and the engineer moved to the spot from which they had climbed out of the pit, and there the Spaniard indicated a stout board platform where Clay could lie down in a prone position and look down into the Mineral de Toledo. It was an awesome experience: He could see the dark wall of the pit but not the remote bottom where Indian workmen were digging out the ore that their women carried to the top. There was only darkness, a kind of glimpse into hell, for up the shaft from time to time came wisps of gray smoke; someone was burning something far, far down in the bowels of the earth.

  Then, slowly emerging from the smoke, perhaps two hundred feet down, came eight more Indian women with baskets on their heads, and as he stared at the weaving pattern their movement created he had the impression that they were walking on air, for he could see no stairway. But when he looked more closely as they climbed higher, he saw what had escaped him before: into the sides of the pit, winding down in an endless spiral so as to achieve a gradual rate of ascent, ran a series of narrow stone steps, which had been cut centuries ago for use by the thousands of Indian men and women who had toiled here.

  As Jubal stared at the steps he was appalled to see what a small area they provided for the climbing feet—about eighteen inches square—and how, through the centuries the stone wall of the pit had been worn smooth by the pressure of a million hands as the workers had steadied themselves in their perilous climb. He thought: It must be even more dangerous climbing back down, for then the whole weight of the body pulls you forward and a false step … He could imagine himself plunging headlong down that abyss. While he was contemplating the horror of such a death the women climbing the stairs reached the top of the shaft, blinking as sunlight struck them. Stepping out of the pit, they moved along the path to deliver their ore to the smelter without a single pause in their movements, so that Clay judged them to be machines, dependable, manageable and cheap. They reminded him of his Negro slaves chopping cotton, except that the slaves worked in daylight.

  By the time the engineer was ready to lead Clay down the shaft and into the mine, my grandfather had prepared himself emotionally to see some great thing, and he was not disappointed, for in later years he often told his family, whether in Virginia or Mexico: “It was one of the most thrilling days of my life, and I seldom use that word.”

  The mine that year was nearly thirteen hundred feet deep straight down, and the descent was, as he had anticipated, perilous, but the Spaniard showed him how, if he kept his right shoulder pressed against the wall, he could negotiate it with relative ease and safety. But the descent seemed endless, a slow drop into hell; however, when they approached the six-hundred-foot mark, the shaft opened out into a spacious cavern of some magnitude. Indeed a small farm could have been installed here with the rocky roof high enough to permit reasonably tall barns.

  “You found a thick lode here?” Clay asked, and when the engineer nodded, Clay said: “But down there it narrows again?”

  “Disappears.”

  Clay halted at the edge of the shaft as it continued downward, as narrow as before, and the magnitude of the decision made at this point more than a century ago stunned him: “You mean, that as the lode began to run out, someone had the courage to argue: ‘Down below there must be the other part,’ and on that blind hope they dug through solid rock even deeper?”

  “The decision wasn’t difficult. In Spain the king received a report every month on the progress of the Toledo Mineral. He relied on our silver, and when he saw it running out he gave an order: ‘Dig deeper,’ and the Indians dug.”

  When Clay asked: “How much deeper?” the engineer said: “You’ll see,” and down they went on the same narrow steps, leaning to the right as before to keep their balance. After perhaps a hundred feet of black rock they came to the second cavern, nearly seven hundred feet down, not quite as spacious as before, but st
ill more than a ballroom in size.

  “They dug here for years,” the engineer said as they descended to the thirteen-hundred-foot level. “This is where they began to come upon the real treasure of Toledo.”

  As Jubal’s eyes became accustomed to the dim light thrown by smoky flares, he saw that he had descended not to a miners’ cave but to an underground village placed in a circle well over five hundred yards in diameter. Here some three dozen Indians and their Mexican overseers toiled as if they were on an open field in sunlight. There was a smithy to sharpen the tools that cut away the rock to find the ore; there were vats of water, a flat area that resembled a restaurant with tables; lost in distant shadows were storehouses. But what astounded Clay the most was the donkeys bringing large chunks of ore from the cutting face to the area where it would be broken into smaller segments for transportation above.

  “How do you get the donkeys in and out? They can’t walk down the steps, can they?”

  “They don’t go out.”

  “Never?”

  “Their bodies are hauled out when they die.” And as Clay stared at the donkeys, plodding along in near darkness, his eyes wandered from them to the Indians and he asked: “The Indians? Do they too stay down here perpetually?” and the Spaniard said: “Not by force. They’re allowed up if they wish, but that climb is fearful, as you’ll see, so some prefer to stay down. Of course, when they grow too old to work, we encourage them to leave, but some prefer to stay and work at little jobs here and there. Some grow fond of their donkeys and stay with them.”

  “But how do they get the donkeys down here?” Clay asked. The Spaniard asked the workmen if any were due to come down that day and they nodded. After more than two hours during which Clay inspected the cavern, finding one amazing aspect after another, the foreman blew a whistle, whereupon an Indian worker began beating a drum and women stopped their steep climb with their baskets. When activity in the shaft had ceased for about twenty minutes, Clay heard a bumping and a scraping, punctuated by the sound of braying, and in time he saw, in a rope sling that slowly descended, the kicking legs of a protesting donkey. When released, the animal ran about, exploring this rocky pasture on which he would spend the rest of his life. With the ropes thus freed, the miners formed a kind of basket into which were tossed different items no longer required below, and after proper signals were sent by tugging on the rope, the drumbeating began and the huge bundle rose, bumping the narrow walls as it went.